What Customers Want? Time to Learn

There was a time, when the owner of the local store was the one who knew his customers personally. Building friendly, neighboring relationships with the local community, the smart store owner could become something like a magic djinn for his loyal audience. Listening carefully to the customers’ wishes and analyzing their shopping habits, he could offer exactly what they needed. Moreover, he could easily suggest related products, diversifying his standard offering.

However, those days are gone. Customers are drowning in the flood of available options and data, trying to make the right choice, while swamped retailers can’t develop personal approach to every customer, especially if we’re talking about web stores.

Nevertheless, this situation has been gradually improving due to the development of technologies, smart data gathering and profound analytics, making it possible to develop deeply personalized customer approach and target the audience according to their wishes.

Make your best offer

Today there are plenty of ways to know your customers better. Collecting the data you need directly from your customers – business-related and personal data, their demographic parameters and shopping habits e-Commerce business owners start to build really customized offerings to present their products in the right way just in time to make the customers happy.

Such offerings are called Next Best Offers. Specially tailored according to the customers’ location, sex, age and web search habits, these ads increase conversion up to 70%, which is drastically more than similar but untailored campaigns.

NBO is a powerful tool driving purchase frequency and increasing customer loyalty. However, it doesn’t mean that it is easy to create a well-targeted and powerful offer. Let’s define some basic steps to improve your NBO program.

Goals first

Even if you have strong analytical capacity, it won’t work properly if you can’t define clear goals you want to achieve. Higher revenue? Higher loyalty? New clients? Choose your primary goal, though stay flexible and always ready to modify it according to your needs.

Keep up to Data

The more information about your customers you can get, the more effective NBO you can create. Due to modern analytical tools you can learn your customers’ location, age, occupation and gender. Also you can learn more about his life and habits, analyzing their previous purchases.

With the development of real-time information, coming from social media channels, retailers are even trying to build their NBOs regarding the customer’s exact location at the given moment. Today’s SoMoLo – social, mobile and local — approach helps not only to increase business, but to transform consumer behavior. When SoMoLo marketing brings positive results, customer engagement improves, making the clients the most loyal brand advocates.

Look inside

Don’t forget that before learning maximum about your customers, you should learn your products first! And it’s not a joke. Sometimes, it is rather difficult to categorize the products and give them appropriate, catchy and informative descriptions, because the producers themselves not always bother with the details. However, if you want to sell the particular products, you should spend quite a lot of time defining their attributes. A good products classification system will help you catch the customers preferences and offer related products in you NBO.

Context matters

Mind that there are also external factors that can affect your offer, such as the method the customer used to reach out to you: personally in store, online, by e-mail or by phone. You can even measure the voice loudness and tone of the customer to understand whether he is happy or irritated at the moment. This context will give you a hint when it’s the best time to make you brilliant offer to increase its chances for success.

Actually, there are literally no unimportant information that cannot be used properly, while targeting your audience, even weather and day of the week can make you change your offer. And now it’s time for you to find out the best way to create effective NBOs that will reach your customers mind.